On April 9, 1968, Lincoln University’s cricket team boarded the inter-island ferry Wahine at Lyttelton for the overnight voyage to Wellington. The 11 young men and three officials were travelling to a university tournament in the North Island on board the ferry.
They were among the 610 passengers and 125 crew unwittingly sailing into the vortex of a tropical cyclone and New Zealand’s worst maritime disaster in modern times.
There have, of course, been other books and documentaries about the catastrophe but few, if any, that have captured the catharsis of the event so directly and with undemonstrative emotion.
More that 50 passengers and crew died. The Lincoln team all survived, but what they saw and experienced in Wellington Harbour during those terrifying hours more than 50 years ago would take decades to emerge.
Paradoxically, the sinking of the Wahine united them in a lifelong bond. Peter Jerram is now keeping a promise to his friends that he would collect their memories together in a book. They have never forgotten, something which heightens the impact of what it was like to be at the centre of disaster.
“It is a truism that memory fades and changes with time,” Jerram writes. “There are many reasons for this, among them a wish to remember a horrendous experience as something better than it was or because subsequent events have altered the story in one’s mind.”
Alongside an analysis of the events – he concludes that errors of judgment, actions by senior officers and the Wahine’s design “strongly contributed” to the disaster – the book lets his team-mates’ voices emerge. These are very “New Zealand” voices – laconic, understated, pragmatic and, at least to begin with, stoic.
As the 149m Wahine rolled in the storm after striking Barrett Reef, the initial humour and bravado gradually dissipated. With visibility reduced to barely 100m and passengers sliding helplessly down the steeply tilting decks as the Wahine pitched on to its side, it became a struggle to survive at an age when you assume you are indestructible.
Which was port and which was starboard, one of the team asked himself. Others describe a sea filled with empty red life rafts floating away from the ship due to the wind, children separated from their parents, of the mounting panic, of the individual decisions to jump from the ship into the seething sea (“the most I’d ever swum was 25 yards in one breath”). There are also moments of truth-telling (“I said to myself, ‘Don’t panic’, but I panicked anyway.”)
Jerram finally jumped from the vessel before being hauled into a lifeboat filled with passengers and crew members. The small, crowded boat struggled through heavy seas to eventually reach Seatoun beach, where a photograph of Jerram carrying a fellow passenger ashore though the breakers became one of the iconic images of the disaster. Later he couldn’t remember helping anyone.
These are remarkable stories; enduring but unvarnished personal accounts of what it means to confront death. Don’t let the book’s strangely punny title spoil an intensely felt exploration of tragedy and survival.
